Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  a name I had heard in Wheeler's mouth when he spoke to me about the Careless Talk Campaign of 1917, during World War One, the war that both he and my father had experienced as children, it seemed incredible that the two of them had still not been erased from the world, that they were not safe more or less in one-eyed, uncertain oblivion as the officer in the portrait would certainly be, unless Tupra knew his identity, the killing in that conflict had been worse than in any other, I mean people were killed in the very worst of ways, with new techniques but also in hand-to-hand combat and with bayonets, and those who had fallen at the front were uncountable, or no one had dared to count them. I tried a slight diversionary tactic, playing for time:

  'Who's that military gendeman?' And I pointed to the drawing. Reresby's answer was contradictory, as if he simply wanted to get rid of the question:

  'I don't know. My grandfather. I like his face.' Then he immediately returned to the matter at hand. 'Tell me why one can't.'

  I didn't know what to reply, I was still very shaken, still dismayed and upset. I nevertheless said something, almost without intending to and certainly without thinking, purely in order not to remain silent:

  'Because then it would be impossible for anyone to live.' I couldn't judge the effect of these words or indeed if they had one, I never found out if he would have laughed or not, if he would have mocked them, if he would have refuted them or scornfully allowed them to fall without even bothering to pick them up, because just then, the moment after I had spoken them, I heard a woman's voice behind me:

  'Who are you with, Bertie, and what are you doing? You're keeping me awake, do you know what time it is, aren't you coming to bed?'

  This was said in a domestic tone of voice. I turned round. The woman had switched on the light in the corridor and her shadowy figure on the threshold was silhouetted against the brightness, she had opened the door but her face was invisible. She was wearing a transparent, ankle-length dressing gown, made of gauze or something similar, tied with a belt or else in another way caught in around the waist and the rest was loose and flimsy, at least that was my impression, her apparently naked figure could be clearly seen through the gauze, although it was unlikely she would be naked, if she had heard my voice, or our voices; she had on slippers with high slender heels, as if she were an old-fashioned model of lingerie or negligees or nightdresses, a pin-up girl from the 1950s or the early '60s, a woman from my childhood. She looked like a calendar girl. She smelled good too, a sexual smell that wafted into the room from the doorway, creating the illusion of dissipating its horrors. She didn't have an hourglass figure nor that of a Coca-Cola bottle, but very nearly, it was outlined perfectly and very attractively against the bright light behind her; she was tall and had long legs, a toboggan down which to slide, so she could have been his ex-wife Beryl, who had so inflamed and aroused De la Garza. I suddenly thought of him perhaps still lying on the floor of the handicapped toilet—less clean now—badly injured and unable to move. I felt a twinge of conscience, but I would not be the one, that night, to go and find him and see how he was, I felt shattered, drained. I'd phone the Embassy another day, someone, sooner or later, was bound to pick him up and call an ambulance. The Manoias, on the other hand, would have long since been sleeping in their beds in the Ritz, placid and reconciled, and Flavia would be satisfied and content to have enjoyed a nocturnal triumph and to have provoked an incident, although she would also have asked herself as she closed her eyes: 'Tonight, I was all right, but will I be all right tomorrow? I'll be another day older.' Whoever the woman on the threshold was, her appearance there obliged me to leave, or finally allowed me to—it didn't seem to me that Tupra was about to introduce me to her.

  'Just working late with a colleague. I'll be right with you, my dear,' he said from behind the desk, and he used that rather old-fashioned term 'my dear.'

  'So there was someone waiting for him, and he doesn't live alone, or at least on some nights he doesn't lack for loving company,' I thought, standing up. 'So he does have a weak point, someone at his side. And he likes the old ways, which isn't quite the same as what he calls the way of the world. Perhaps the way of the world was there in what I had seen on the screen, and in the handicapped toilet, and that's what he's just poisoned me with.'

  6 Shadow

  I didn't hurry, I lingered and delayed, and allowed a few months to pass before that 'other day' came when I finally decided to go in person to the Embassy to see how De la Garza was. Not that I wasn't concerned about his fate, I often pondered it with unease and sorrow, and in the days that followed that long unpleasant night, I kept an attentive eye on the London papers to see if they carried any report of the incident, but none of them picked it up, probably because Rafita hadn't reported the assault to the police. Tupra's intimidation, or mine when I translated Tupra's words giving those very precise instructions, had clearly had its effect. I also bought El País and Abc each day (the latter because it took more interest than most in the vicissitudes of diplomats, as well as those of bishops), but during the first few days nothing appeared in those either. Only after about ten days, in an article on the comparative dangers of European capitals, did El País's London correspondent mention in passing: 'There was some alarm among the Spanish colony in London a week or so ago when an Embassy employee was admitted to a hospital after being beaten up one night by complete strangers, for no apparent reason and in the middle of the street, according to his initial version of events. Later, he admitted that the brutal attack (which left him with many bruises and several broken ribs) had taken place in a fashionable disco and had been the result of a fight. This somewhat reassured people, since it was clearly a chance, isolated event that he possibly brought on himself and that was, at least, directed at him personally'

  It would have been impossible for De la Garza to conceal his state from superiors and colleagues, and so in order to justify being away on sick leave, he would have told that story, saying, perhaps, that some brutish louts had provoked him, or that he had acted in defense of a lady (offenders of ladies like to pass themselves off as the exact opposite: I could still remember his words 'Women are all sluts, but for looks you can't beat the Spanish.'), or that someone had insulted Spain and he'd had no alternative but to get rough and come to blows, I was curious to know what fantasy he would have invented in order to emerge from the episode relatively unscathed (well, unscathed from his point of view and according to his account of things, because whoever it was had clearly thrashed him): 'Oh, they gave me a thorough pummelling, true enough, but I gave as good as I got and beat the shit out of them,' he would have crowed, still mingling coarseness with pedantry, like so many Spanish writers past and present, a veritable plague. Only the antipathy felt for him among his own circle could explain the words: 'that he possibly brought on himself it was a little uncalled-for, and the correspondent would doubtless have received a reprimand for his lack of objectivity. It amused me to imagine myself as a hard Mafia type, and at least I learned that Tupra had been spot on, he had diagnosed it right there, in the toilet, two broken ribs, maybe three, at most four, perhaps he was one of those men who could estimate the effect of each blow and each cut, depending on the part of the body and the force with which the blow was dealt, like surgeons or hitmen, perhaps he was experienced in this and had learned to gauge the intensity and depth and never went too far, but knew exactly how much damage he was inflicting and tried not to get carried away, unless, of course, he intended to. It would clearly be best not to get into a fight with him, a physical fight I mean.

  And so I let time pass, telling myself that it would be better to phone De la Garza or to go and see him when he was more recovered and the anger and shock had subsided a little; and the fear, of course, which would be the feeling that had gone deepest. As far as I knew, he had obeyed us, Tupra and me, he had done as we said; he hadn't even gone telling tales to Wheeler or to his father, Don Pablo, with his now waning influence. I hadn't visited Wheeler for some time, but I
still spoke to him on the phone every week or every two weeks, and while these were, as almost always, delightful stimulating conversations, they were, nonetheless, fairly routine. One day, I casually mentioned Rafita and he interrupted me at once: 'Oh, haven't you heard? It was terrible, he got beaten up good and proper and is still in the hospital, I believe. I haven't heard anything from him directly, he's not yet in a state to speak to anyone, only from people at the Embassy and from his father, who flew over to London to be with him and look after him during the first few days, and since he didn't leave Rafa's bedside for a moment, he had no time to come up to Oxford, and since I never go anywhere now, we didn't see each other.' 'Good heavens, what happened?' I asked hypocritically. 'I don't know exactly' he said. 'He must have been drunk and he has, apparently, changed his story several times, contradicting himself, he probably doesn't know what happened either or doesn't remember because he was too far gone, you've seen how fond he is of the bottle, do you remember when he was here, how he immediately bonded with Lord Rymer? He went too far with his impertinence, I imagine, with that crude and to me incomprehensible lexicon he occasionally adopts, apparently it was some compatriots of his, of yours, that is, who beat the living daylights out of him in a toilet in a disco, as if they'd been waiting there to pounce on him, it sounds like something schoolboys would do, which fits of course. But the fact is they beat him to a pulp, and there's nothing schoolboyish about that, they broke several major bones. And in a handicapped toilet of all places; that doesn't bode very well, does it?' Wheeler couldn't help seeing the comical side of almost everything and he added slightly mischievously (I could imagine the twinkle in his eyes): Apparently he's completely encased in plaster. When the other patients catch a glimpse of him from the corridor, they mistake him for The Mummy' And he immediately moved on to another subject, to do with the peculiar Spanish expression he had used—zurrarle la badana a alguien—to beat the living daylights out of someone: 'Do you still say that in Spanish or is it very old hat now? By the way, I've never known what "badana" means, do you?' I realized that I hadn't the faintest idea and felt the same embarrassment I used to feel years ago when my Oxford students would confront me with their malicious questions, and I would find myself having to lie to them in class and to improvise ridiculous, false etymologies which they diligently noted down. 'It's quite common in Spanish not to know the actual meaning of what you're saying, far more so than in English or in other languages,' Sir Peter went on, 'and yet you Spaniards come out with those phrases with such pride and aplomb: for example, what the devil does "joder la marrana" mean? Literally. Or "a pie juntillas" (I've noticed that some ignorant authors write "a pies juntillas" and I don't know about now, but that used to be considered unacceptable)? Or "a pie enjuto" or "a dos velas" or "caersele los anillos"? Why have an idiom about rings falling off when rings, if they do anything, tend, on the contrary, to get stuck. And why do you call street blocks "manzanas"? Apparently no one knows, I've even asked members of the Real Academia Espanola, but they just shrug unconcernedly and with not a flicker of embarrassment. I mean, why "apples"? It's absurd. Street blocks don't look anything like apples, even from above. And why do you make that odd gesture signifying "a dos velas" where you place the index and middle fingers of your right hand on either side of your nose and draw them down towards your upper lip, it's very strange, I can't see any connection at all with being down to your last two candles, which is presumably what it means. You use gestures a lot when you talk, but most of them make no sense at all, they're virtually opaque and often seem to have nothing to do with their meaning—like that one where you rest the fingers of one hand on the upright palm of the other, do you know the one I mean, I'd demonstrate it for you if you could see me, but I never see you, you hardly ever come now, is Tupra exploiting you or have you got a girlfriend? Anyway, I think it's used to indicate "Stop, don't go on" or perhaps "Let's go.'"

  Wheeler was tireless when it came to discussing linguistic matters and idioms, he paused and lingered over them and momentarily forgot about everything else, and, as I knew, from the days when I first taught translation and Spanish at Oxford, I was profoundly ignorant of my own language, not that it mattered much, for it's an ignorance I share with almost all my compatriots and they couldn't care less. I was beginning to think that sometimes his mind wavered slightly, rather as he occasionally lost the ability to speak. Not in the same way, he didn't go blank, not at all, and he didn't talk nonsense or get confused, but he strayed from the subject more than usual and didn't listen with his usual alacrity and attention, as if he were less interested in the external, and as if the internal were gaining ground—his disquisitions, his deliberations, his insistent thoughts—and, as is often the case with the old, perhaps his memories too, although he didn't care to tell or share these, but maybe he did go over them in his mind, put them in order, unfold them to himself, and explain and weigh them up, or perhaps it was simply a matter of putting them straight and contemplating them, like someone taking a few steps back and surveying his library or his paintings or his rows of tin soldiers if he collects them, everything he has accumulated and arranged over a lifetime, probably with no other objective—this does happen—than that of stepping back and looking at them.

  This form of loquacious introspection, which I noticed when we spoke on the phone, occasionally made me fear that I didn't have much time left in which to ask him all the things I'd always wanted to ask him and which I kept postponing for reasons of discretion, respect and a dislike of worming things out of people and stealing from them what they are keeping in reserve or storing away, or of seeming overly curious or even impertinent, together with a natural tendency to wait for people to tell me only what they really want to and not what they are tempted to tell me because of a particular conversational thread or the direction a conversation is taking or because they feel flattered or moved—the temptation to tell is as strong as it is transient, and it soon vanishes if you resist it or, indeed, give in to it, except that in the latter case, there's no remedy but regret or, as the Italians put it, rimpianto, a kind of sorrowful regret to be ruminated upon in private. And the truth is that I wanted to ask him those things before it became problematic or impossible, I wanted to know, however briefly and anecdotally, about his involvement in the Spanish Civil War—a war that had so marked my parents—and about which I had known nothing until recently; about his adventures with MI6, his special missions in the Caribbean, West Africa, and South East Asia between 1942 and 1946, according to Who's Who, in Havana and in Kingston and in other unknown places, although he was still not allowed to talk about them even after sixty years nor, doubtless, after however many years of life remained to him; he would take his story to the grave if I didn't get it out of him, that Acting Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Wheeler, born in the antipodes as Rylands; about his unspoken relationship with his brother Toby, whom I had known first and admired and mourned, with no idea that they were related; as well as about his activities with the group that had no name when it was created and still has none now, nor any 'interpreters of people,' 'translators of lives' or 'anticipators of stories,' indeed, he had criticized Tupra for employing such terms in private: 'Names, nicknames, sobriquets, aliases, euphemisms are quickly taken up and, before you know it, they've stuck,' he had said, 'you find yourself always referring to things or people in the same way, and that soon becomes the name they're known by. And then there's no getting rid of it, or forgetting it'; and it was true, I couldn't forget those terms now, because I was part of that group and those were the terms I'd learned from Wheeler's diminished contemporary heirs; and I wanted to know, too, about the death of his young wifeVal or Valerie, although he always preferred to leave that for another day and, besides, he believed, deep down, that one should never tell anything.

  It even seemed to me—I had no proof of this, it was only a suspicion—that Wheeler might be loosening the grip of that hand that never let go of its prey, as was not yet the case with Tupra or with me
or, probably, with young Pérez Nuix, all three of us were still at the restless or at least vigilant age, how long do those energetic years last, the years of anxiety and quickened pulses, the years of movement, unexpected reversals, and vertigo, the years when all of that and so much more occurs, so many doubts and torments, in which we struggle and plot and fight and try to inflict scratches on others and avoid getting scratched ourselves and to turn things to our own advantage, and when all of those activities are sometimes so very skilfully disguised as noble causes that even we, the creators of those disguises, are fooled. I mean that Wheeler was distancing himself from his machinations and his plans, at least that was the impression he gave me, as if his will and determination were finally on the wane or as if he suddenly scorned them and saw them as pointless and futile, after decades of building and cultivating and feeding them and, of course, of applying them. He was focused entirely on himself, and little else interested him. But then he was over ninety, and so this was hardly surprising or deserving of reproach, it was high time really.

  And despite these warnings and my growing fear that I didn't have, as I'd always felt I had, unlimited time with him, I continued putting off my visits and my questions and still did not go and see him. I would also have liked him to tell me more about Tupra, about his antecedents, his history, his potential dangerous-ness, his character, the 'probabilities that ran in his veins'—he would know more about those, he had known him for longer— especially after that night of the sword and the videos, the memory of which had been bothering me for weeks and would do so indefinitely; but given that I'd decided not to leave or decamp, not yet to abandon my post and with it my work, salary and general state of confusion, perhaps I was avoiding the possibility of really finding out and—if Wheeler did as I asked him and deciphered Tupra fully—of having to stop what I had, for the moment, not without some violence to myself, determined to continue. I realized that I had reached a point when each passing day made it harder and harder for me to go back, let alone just to pack it all in and return to Madrid—doing what exactly, living how, just to be closer to Luisa as she moved further away from me?—a place which, nevertheless, I had still not entirely left. My mind was largely there, but not my body, and the latter was growing accustomed to strolling about London and breathing in its smells on waking and on going to sleep (always with one eye open, because of the lack of shutters, and like just one more inhabitant of that large island), to spending part of the day in the company of Tupra and Pérez Nuix and Mulryan and Rendel and, on occasions, Jane Treves or Branshaw, to the initially saving grace of certain routines in which, unexpectedly, you suddenly find yourself caught as in a spider's web, unable to imagine any other way of life, even if it isn't any great shakes and happened purely by chance and without your asking. No, it was no longer easy for me to think of myself taking another less comfortable and less well-paid job, less attractive and less varied, after all, each morning I was confronted by new faces or else went deeper into familiar ones, and it was a real challenge to decipher them. To guess at their probabilities, to predict their future behavior, it was almost like writing novels, or at least biographical sketches. And sometimes there were outings, on-the-spot translations and the occasional trip out of London.